HD7950 Crossfire, is it worth it?

[andrescelano]

Yup, title says it all, I have heard on various sites that it's crap and doesn't work as well, should I do it? My cpu is a stock i5 2500k and my mobo is a regular p8p67. Thanks

 

[maddogfargo]

Pros / personal experiences:

I've had 3 crossfire setups over 10 years. Only ever had 3 games not work properly with it, and that was mostly due to newness. Once crossfire support was added it worked well, but you will run into minor compatibility issues until it is supported.

I also had very few issues with AMD drivers. My GTX 970 has driver crashed more in the past year than ALL of my AMD cards, EVER. I had to custom BIOS mod it and tweak the voltage tables to get it stable, and it's fine now.

Performance wise, HD 7950 crossfire runs like a single GTX 980. If you can get a good deal on a 2nd matching HD 7950, then it can run very nicely. Just make sure your motherboard will support dual GPUs at PCIe x16 / x16, or x8 / x8 at minimum, so that you can get the most out of it.

Cons:

The big down side is the heat, fan noise and power usage. this annoyance is the core reason why I dropped my dual HD 7950 crossfire setup, got a GTX 970, and overclocked it to 980 perf levels. I'm getting 90% of the performance my old crossfire setup gave me, but I'm using 250w less power and the heat and noise is substantially better.

Recommendation:

All things considered, I honestly think going with a single high end GPU like a 970 or 980 or an R9 390 / 390x or even an air cooled Fury will be a much better option.

 

[fizbiniii]

i had crossfire 7950. hated the microstutter so bad i now play with one card and dial back settings. even with high frame rates it felt like 25fps. i will never crossfire again. single gpu is the only way to go. if i could afford it i would go gtx 980ti. my friends who have used crossfire and sli warned me but i didnt listen

 

[renz496]

If you can afford single more powerful card then it is better to go that route. Unless you prefer of having troubles.

 

[McDuncun]

Like the saying goes, one good card is always better than 2 mid lvl cards. The microstutter will be an issue so it`s best just to kick the 7950 and get a new R9 series chip. Granted it should be at least a 390 to make the upgrade worth it.

 

[McDuncun]

If you can afford single more powerful card then it is better to go that route. Unless you prefer of having troubles.

Hahahaha nice!

 

[runesmite14]

I've had crossfire 7950's and I currently have crossfire 290x's. The recent release of Frame Pacing does wonders for Crossfire performance. Basically, the only time I've noticed microstutter is in titles that exclusively use DirectX9. In 10/11, as long as there's a crossfire profile, it works wonders.

However, with the release of the Crimson Driver (Aside from it's few oversights, from a UI standpoint) the DirectX 9 performance has skyrocketed. I used to get very bad microstutter in Skyrim, but now, it's gone.

So, the driver updates are rolling, and it can only get better.

That being said, I'm not going to deny that the power consumption (especially with two r9 290x's) is enormous. Be sure you have enough amperage and wattage on your PSU to handle two cards if you're going to go that route, and make sure you have the thermal headroom. Otherwise, you may have problems.

My experience has been well enough that I've stuck with crossfire (especially since it has become freesync capable) and the gaming performance is well worth it.

From my experience with crossfire 7950's I could play Crysis 2 on max everything fine, with 60 fps solid if I turned down the parallax. But, as always, ymmv.

 

[andrescelano]

Ok thanks a lot guys! I might actually just overclock my cpu see what i can do with that

 

[renz496]

When i say troubles i meant multi gpu in general, not just CF. True performance will be amazing once they work as intended but when they not the second card are useless. Add on the multi gpu specific problems some people might find it not worth the cost and effort. And if you look the trend closely game dev and game engine are moving away more and more from multi gpu. Look at recent Just Cause 3 where the game engine did not support multi gpu and batman arkham knight dev commenting about their game will not going to support multi gpu. That is from triple A developer. What about others that have even much less budget? Another example is Sniper Elite 3. Dx11 version of the game did habe crossfire profile from AMD. But for the mantle version crossfire are not supported because Rebellion decided not to.

 

[fizbiniii]

i had memory leakage when i early adopted mantle for bf4